Name: Robot Surgeons and 4 Other Medical Advances That Sound Like Sci-Fi
Uploaded: 2020-05-06T18:45:30.000Z
Duration: 11 min 39 s
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But even in a world where open-heart surgery and brain-scanning headsets

sound almost mundane, some medical advances do truly seem

So here are five recent developments that sound like they're

straight out of the future, but are already around today.

Robots and surgeons go way back—in fact, robots have been

in operating rooms since the late 1980s, helping out

But in February 2020, surgeons in the Netherlands kicked things up a notch.

They used a very precise robotic arm with teeny tiny tools

on the end to operate on blood vessels just a few times

It was the first human trial of robot-assisted supermicrosurgery,

which is surgery on vessels smaller than eight-tenths of a millimeter.

Surgeries at these scales are really tricky for humans,

because our hands do shake—maybe just a little bit,

but at these scales, every millimeter counts.

So only highly-trained surgeons are capable of doing these procedures.

One of these very precise surgeries, called

a lymphatico-venous anastomosis, or an LVA, is a treatment

for breast cancer patients whose lymph isn't draining properly.

Lymph is a fluid that transports white blood cells

and other nutrients around the body—and when it doesn't

drain properly, it can cause swelling and pain.

But with surgery, tiny lymph vessels can be connected

to blood vessels to give the lymph another way out.

This surgery is at the very limit of human capabilities,

but the team of surgeons and roboticists in the Netherland thought

they might just be able to make the procedure easier and safer.

They devised a robot called MUSA, which mimics a surgeon.

It has two arms that go over the patient, with tiny surgical tools

To manipulate the robot, a surgeon looks at the patient

through a microscope and moves a set of controllers

as if they were operating directly on a person.

But it's the robot's tiny tools that are actually

The robot mimics the surgeon's movements exactly,

It also scales those movements down, since the surgeon is looking

at the patient through a microscope and making bigger motions.

Out of 20 surgeries, MUSA assisted in eight, and all of them

Unlike a human, the robot didn't twitch or get tired,

and it could hold an awkward position forever if it had to.

This success is really exciting, because a robot like MUSA

could make this type of complex surgery possible

for more surgeons—which means more people could get

The reason a lot of people who are paralyzed can't move their limbs

is because the nerves that should be taking signals from the brain

to the rest of the body aren't working the way they should.

And for many people with this kind of nerve damage,

But in a case study published in 2019 in the journal

The Lancet Neurology, a team of researchers in France found

a creative way for a man who was paralyzed below the neck

Their idea was to bypass the nerves completely—by recording messages

straight from the brain and sending them to a machine

The solution combined incredible advances in both

First, the team inserted two small implants into the patient's brain

to measure activity in the areas that control movement.

The implants were hooked up wirelessly to a computer system,

which decoded the brain signals and translated them

into instructions for a virtual avatar or a full-body exosuit.

But it was not as straightforward as it sounds.

See, scientists know which regions of the brain broadly

control movement, but for this contraption to work, the system

needed to match up an exact pattern of active brain cells

And that's not exactly easy. Like, what does [this] look like

on a brain scan, compared to, like, [this]?

The team started by having the patient think about a specific action

—like rotating his wrist or moving a wheelchair forward.

The computer—which was hooked up wirelessly to his brain—

would record the signals that thought created.

Then, over the course of two years, the computer created a model

of the patient's brain—basically like a dictionary that matched

In a way, he was both training the computer to understand

his brain signals, and training himself to think in a structured

and focused way that a computer would understand.

And in the end, the patient was able to use the system

He drove a wheelchair and made virtual hands do things like

He also gained the ability to start and stop an exoskeleton.

It was attached to a harness mounted on the ceiling, so while

he wasn't completely independent, he could essentially walk.

Now, this wasn't the first time scientists created

an interface between a brain and a computer, but the small surgery

it required was much less invasive than other methods.

And while it's still a long ways from widespread use, it's a big step

toward developing a way for paralyzed people to control robotic limbs

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Robot Surgeons and 4 Other Medical Advances That Sound Like Sci-Fi

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